Cultural interpretation and universal human rights: A response to Daniel A. Bell

Political Theory

Volumn 27, Issue 6, 1999, Pages 840-848

  Charney, Evan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033249525     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591799027006006     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Daniel A. Bell, "The Limits of Liberal Justice," Political Theory 26, no. 4 (1998): 557-582. All page references to this review essay are provided in the text.
2. Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1995).
3. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism, Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1994), 62.
4. Ibid., 59.
5. Ibid.
6. John Rawls, "The Law of Peoples," in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, ed. S. Shute and S. Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
7. Ibid., 68.
8. Ibid., 62-63.
9. Rawls adds the qualification "as in a liberal society," because in what he calls a well-ordered "consultation hierarchy," "as members of associations and corporate bodies [persons] have the right at some point in the process of consultation to express political dissent and the government has an obligation to take their dissent seriously and to give a conscientious reply." Ibid., 62.
10. Ibid., 68-70. It is not entirely clear in Rawls's formulation whether he intends this principle to apply to all human rights; for example, persons only have a right to life or to emigration as members of some corporate body.
11. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1995), 157.
12. Ibid., 82.
13. In saying this, however, I do not mean to endorse Kymlicka's broader view according to which liberty of conscience, and liberal freedom in general, are largely equated with a principle of individual autonomy. (See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, chaps. 5 and 8.) The "liberal individualism" I endorse is limited solely to that described in the text.
14. H.L.A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural Rights?" Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 175-91.
15. Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard, Le moine et le philosophe: Le bouddhisme aujourd'hui (Paris: NiL editions, 1997).
16. Rawls, "The Law of Peoples," 68.
17. This presupposes, of course, that we already have a pretty good idea of what they are. I believe this to be the case, at least to the extent of knowing what the minimum basic human rights are. The burden of proof lies with those like Bell who support basic human rights norms while attacking liberalism's "parochial universalism." Bell does not even hint at what an alternate, non-liberal, "non-Western" conception of basic human rights might look like.
18. Fang Lizhi, speech made in Beijing, February 25, 1989, in The Broken Mirror: China after Tiananmen, ed. George Hicks (Chicago: St. James Press, 1990), xxiii.
19. "The True Meaning of Freedom, Law, and Democracy," student proclamation from Beijing University, April 25,1989, in China's Search for Democracy: The Student Mass Movement of 1989, ed. Suzanne Ogden, Kathleen Hartford, Lawrence Sullivan, and David Zweig (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 114-15.